A survey of more than 250 IT professionals from cloud storage provider TwinStrata has found that more than half of organisations have at least half their data as inactive, taking up valuable storage space.

The report defines inactive or passive data as data which has been untouched for 60 days, and found that 56% of those polled had more than half their data inactive. A quarter (22%) of respondents added that three quarters of their stored data was inactive.

A major reason for this terrific rise is due to the spurt in the use of intranet applications like document collaboration, file sharing and records management. Interestingly, file sharing on SharePoint (82% of respondents) appears...

At WWDC, among a litany of other announcements, Apple unleashed iCloud Drive, representing further entry from Cupertino into the cloud storage space. But is it too little, too late?

Sitting as part of iOS 8, Apple is offering up to 5 gigabytes of free storage, with users being charged a princely 59p a month for up to 20GB and £2.40 a month for 200GB. This certainly compares favourably with Microsoft’s OneDrive - £5 per month for 200GB – and niche players such as Box and Dropbox, with...

UK-based cloud service provider iomart Group has announced pre-tax profits of £14.6m for the end of the financial year – and vows to continue towards bespoke private and hybrid cloud as opposed to mass public cloud.

Revenue stood at £55.6m compared to £43.1m in 2013, representing a 29% increase, whilst revenues from iomart’s hosting segment were up by 40% to £44.7m – higher than the company’s overall revenue last year.

Do people really back up their data – or are they just saying they do?

Even in today’s world of huge capacity drives and immediately accessible online backup, you’d be amazed at the number of users who simply don’t back up their data. While this may be regrettable at home, it’s unacceptable at work. Teams can’t function properly if team members lose information. And promises to do it ‘tomorrow’ (bad) or ‘as soon as possible’ (worse) just don’t...

Anyone who might have spotted a large order of champagne delivered to the Armonk area last night will now know why: IBM has just set a new record for the amount of big data stored on tape.

The Big Blue scientists have announced an eye-watering 85.9 billion bits of data per square inch on the latest tape, built from barium ferrite in conjunction with Fujitsu. This translates to 154 terabytes of uncompressed data on a standard LTO size cartridge – or, in non-tech terms, around 154 million books in one...

“Anyone starting a company right now would have to be completely bonkers to build their own infrastructure,” roars Interoute chief technical officer Matthew Finnie.

Finnie is a man never short of an opinion or two, and with the number of born in the cloud companies increasing, this seems like a pretty safe bet. But here’s another view: the skills gap in the industry continues to get bigger.

“You’ve almost got two- or three-speed adoption to the cloud,” he tells CloudTech....

When Box filed its long-awaited paperwork to become a public company, it set off discussions about the financial health of the company, and the long-term viability of its business model.

At issue was how much money Box spends- particularly on sales and marketing - compared to its revenue. People began to wonder whether the founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, was a quack or a modern-day genius.

The much publicised race to the bottom in cloud pricing started with Google, Microsoft and Amazon all slashing their prices for virtual machines, storage and bandwidth. In some instances, these prices reductions saved consumers between 40% and 60% on their cloud bills.

Cloud provider CenturyLink looks to become competitive with these cloud services by following suit by instituting big pricing cuts all across the board on their cloud services. CenturyLink announced their cloud pricing cuts on their blog which...

The latest edition of Six of the Best, featuring the CloudTech editorial team’s favourite links from around the web, has either a slightly hotchpotch feel to it, or covers an extremely wide range of cloud computing stories over the past couple of weeks. We’ll leave it up to you to decide.

Exclusive Nikola Pizurica, president of the company which provides the OneBigDrive cloud storage app, has told CloudTech that while Microsoft renaming its storage biz OneDrive “could lead to some confusion” for consumers, the company is focused on its own goals.

“We are going our way,” he affirms, although adding he was ‘surprised’ at the time that Microsoft chose to rename to OneDrive.

UK-based hosting provider FlintHosts has announced the launch of Flint|Charity, a service which offers free shared hosting and discounted cloud hosting to charities.

The free shared package allows for up to 1GB of storage, one hour of free technical support and a name check from the company, while the cloud package offers the requisite name check, hosting on Flint’s enterprise level platform at a 50% discount with fully managed service.

With every passing day, more and more IT managers are taking the plunge and opting for the world of cloud. This comes as no surprise when you consider the benefits it brings: adopting cloud gives employees the freedom to work where they want, whilst still cutting costs for businesses.

But with any new technology as soon as the honeymoon period is over, the real work begins. Cloud traffic is growing at an alarming rate, but this the pressure is on the network operators carrying the cloud, not the enterprises...

Microsoft has announced price cuts on its compute facility by up to 35% and its storage by up to 65%, days after Google and Amazon Web Services did likewise.

Perhaps this is the least surprising news of the year – Amazon’s price cuts being the second least surprising. That said, everyone suspected Redmond’s cloud announcement wasn’t going to be just renaming Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure.

The last decade has seen massive growth in data volumes and there has been a corresponding seismic shift in the way in which organizations deal with data. While storage technology has become relatively affordable and improved, it has struggled to keep pace with the data growth.

Storage infrastructure expansion can be costly and is a continual process. Freeing up storage capacity is never an easy decision, with business requirements and...

Time and tide wait for no one. Wise words and all the more so amid the recent flooding experienced up and down the country with even the Thames bursting its banks just a few miles short of central London.

If it wasn’t for the Thames Barrier who knows what might have happened? It’s sobering that a fifth of all the 30 year old barrier’s closures took place in the first two months of 2014. Not surprisingly this has sparked fresh calls for the building of a new one should the current one...

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